I'll do 7.5:1 on up to $200

The gun lobby isn't like, say, the bank/finance lobby. The finance lobby has to give tremendous amounts of money in order to influence American politics because basically no one but bankers cares about bankers. Guns are different. People love guns, and a large fraction of the American population will vote politicians in and out of office based on how angry the gun nuts are. So the gun lobby doesn't so much try to directly buy politician's votes like the finance lobby. They give to politicians, sure, but they spend a lot of effort and money in getting their message to those that are passionate about guns. And they will target vulnerable politicians who are anti-gun as well.

Saw $36m in 2014 today. Can't vouch for that vs the $12.

U realize guns can be carried across state lines right? California and Chicago have some of the strictest gun laws in the nation how has that worked out?

I'm not posting anything of substance until Fly and Ikestoys have contributed.

Next week the topic should be hotdog stands.

Yeah that's a valid and kind of huge issue. Without like border checks for out-of-state guns, which I admit would be basically absurd and impossible and prohibitively expensive both financially and administratively, gun sales registration and regulation is unlikely to be especially effective unless it's nationwide.

Another obvious problem with gun regulation is that mental health is a fluid thing. Like, there's no reason that some normal dude couldn't go through the process and purchase firearms, ten years later become nuts, and still engage in a shooting or mass shooting.

Still, the thing is that even like a 5% reduction in gun incidents would be a reduction of approximately 2500 incidents this year, or 600 deaths, or 1200 casualties (these are rough estimates based on this year's stats), which seems valuable to me both as a naked fact and in proportion to American deaths by terrorism, whether domestic or abroad, which on the decade are estimated to be approximately 400 (and I'm aiming high). It seems pretty hard, to me, to argue that nationwide registration and limitation, and bullet restrictions, would fail to provide even a 5% reduction in gun violence. Which makes it very hard for me to believe that gun regulation is a failing prospect.

It's not gonna CURE this enormous problem, obviously, but that's a terrible argument to use against trying.

dk I think the response to your argument is first that accepting the numbers you have there, ~ $13m is not negligible, especially when much of it is committed to local elections and statehouse campaigns.

The second response is that the burden would be on the recipients of gun lobby funding to demonstrate that it does not affect their policies, voting or governance, especially given that donations to the Republican Party and their causes accounts for ~ 95% of that funding and that the Republican Party is perfectly reliable on being anti-regulation.

The third response is that the numbers you have there don't seem to account for indirect advertisement, etc., which is not a donation to anyone (especially true after Citizen's United) -- though I could be wrong about this. I tried to verify and struggled to do so one way or the other, though it SEEMS clear to me. Honestly, I don't think that even matters, though. $13m per year(ish) is plenty to matter.

The fourth response is that the leverage of gun rights voters is disproportionate and being on the wrong side of that issue is fatal for a Republican would-be candidate, owing largely to the NRA's work. This means that you are RIGHT that the amount is not comparable to numerous industries -- including for example insurance and oil, which is a whole other issue I get riled up about -- but this does not mean that the influence of the gun rights lobby is proportionally small. It's obviously very significant.

It's pretty easy to be for "gun control" but what's the end game, round up every gun? That should go about as well as the hated war on drugs. I personally would like to put the genie back in the bottle, no guns, period, but it's far too late for that and banning new gun sales, sorting by what looks scariest first, seems like a fraction of a half measure.

Man, Newscorp does not want Trump getting the GOP nod. They give every other right-wing idiot a pass but they have to make it clear as day that Trump is the moron. I hope it's Hillary vs. Trump so everybody at FOX News can have a collective aneurysm.

Rounding up all the guns seemed to work just fine in Australia in the 1990s. I don't see why it wouldn't work here.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/crime/201...provide_a.html

subbed

Yeah, Trump does REALLY poorly in general electorate polling. Repubs will ensure he doesn't get the nom.

I've lived in extremely rural areas of the south and mid-west, and while most of the "pry it from my cold dead hands" types would be first in line to turn them in, I can promise you some of these people will not give up their guns. I mean a lot of them actually hunt to put food on the table. Not a deer in the fall, more like weekly hunting to keep the kids feed.

There's blood on their hands.

Not sure what the end game is but establishing beneficial first steps is where I'm at anyway, you know?

I am kind of in love with ammunition registration and sales restrictions, and use-based requirements re: storage of ammunition, which would make mass shooting almost impossible because possessing numerous clips would be extremely difficult.

Also fully in love with assault rifle blanket bans entirely - I just struggle to understand the counterarguments to this one. There's a famous West Wing episode on this topic and I honestly feel like Josh felt in that episode: "But we can all come together on the [assault rifle], right?" It's the, you know, rifle designed to assault things. With bullets. It kills a bunch of people if you want it to. That's the design. It bothers me that viewing that as an inappropriate legal weapon is viewed by my opponents as a truly irrational, horrible opinion.

Lots of guns are unregistered. How do you go about finding the bulk of them? Is the idea to make the penalty for having a gun so harsh that people are scared NOT to turn them in?

No one is talking about making someone's deer rifle illegal. Or a break action shotgun. Hunting weapons were completely unaffected by Australia's gun laws.

I could swear it was "we can all come together on grenade launchers" which of course is ridiculous as I'm not aware of grenade launchers ever being legal in the first place.

Yeah it was grenade launchers, I'll put in brackets, my point is not that SORKIN agrees with me, it's that I feel exactly the same as the character was expressing in that scene, regarding ARs.

Gotcha. That's why I was asking about what the real end game is.

Yeah I have no desire to make single action rifles or hunting rifles or home defense shotguns illegal. That's not what I'm talking about here. What I care about is use-based restrictions and licenses, with rigorous qualification training and safety training, and restrictions on what can even be stored in the home or NOT stored in a registered gun zone in the first place. That is NOT me saying that no firearm can be stored in the home.

I also want to clarify, again for like the 9th time on these forums, that guns themselves, at least some models, are valuable, useful, enjoyable tools that are not of their nature evil. Target shooting is absolutely awesome. I do not LIKE hunting, but I'm not trying to ban that either. I care about the killing of people with easily acquired ridiculously lethal weapons designed specifically for that purpose. I have no illusions about preventing all gun violence. My aim is REDUCTION without preventing recreational, sporting, utilitarian, and legitimate protective ownership of appropriate firearms.

That's for the presidency, not just to win the nomination, right?

Would be nice if LE didn't kill the only people with information on the terrorist attack. Reminds me of 24 when Bauer would always kill the only person who knew where Kim was.

That's what they do though. [1]



[1] Unless you kill 9 African Americans in a church, then they take you alive and buy you Burger King.

lol at title change, yo I'm trying to GET THE THREAD GOIN' so this exercise isn't a total failure and waste

I did laugh though